The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is, on its face, an association of clinicians who produce guidance on medical interventions for those with gender dysphoria. The financial incentives underlying that guidance are worth noting. Organizations that normalize these interventions and promote their safety have a direct stake in their widespread adoption.
The FTC, alongside several states, is now suing WPATH. The complaint accuses the organization of providing clinicians with a framework for making false and unsubstantiated claims to parents about the safety, necessity, and medical consensus behind puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors. Among the specific allegations: WPATH omitted all age limitations for mastectomy and genital surgery from its 2022 “Standards of Care” without medical evidentiary basis, failed to disclose serious, documented side effects of cross-sex hormones, and labeled virtually every pediatric transition service “medically necessary.”
Two things every company and hospital should take from this:
- The organizations that companies and hospitals entrust to educate and inform are compromised by ideology. The phrase “would you rather have a live daughter, or a dead son” has been used by clinicians operating under WPATH’s framework, which represents transition services as “lifesaving,” despite no evidence that these interventions reduce suicide rates.
- Employers providing health insurance must ask their insurers how they are categorizing certain procedures. They may be using WPATH guidance to classify everything from hormone blockers to double mastectomies for minors as “medically necessary.” Your company’s health plan may be funding this mass experiment on children.
WPATH is not a neutral medical body. It is an interest group that launders ideology through the language of expertise.